Stop Pasting Your Style Guide Into Every New Chat

A Claude Code skill for writing is a plain markdown file you save once, and Claude loads it on its own whenever you ask for something written. Your style rules live in the file instead of in a paragraph you paste into every new chat. Mine sits at ~/.claude/skills/my-voice/SKILL.md. It started as five words I was sick of deleting. There’s a blank one below you can copy.

*Part 1 of Claude Code for Bloggers.*

For months I made the same corrections on every draft. Delete the em dashes. Put the contractions back. Cut “delve.” Cut “unlock.” Cut “seamless.” Then I’d open a new chat the next morning and do the whole thing again.

The writing wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t mine, and some days fixing it took longer than starting from a blank page.

I’d already done the obvious fix. I wrote a style guide, which is the approach I walked through in how I customize LLM voice to match my brand. Feed it your samples, write out what makes your voice yours, adjust as you go. Good advice. I still stand behind it.

It doesn’t solve the part where you hand that guide over again every single time.

The problem a style guide doesn’t solve

A style guide works while the AI is looking at it. Paste it in, and the next twenty messages come out sounding like you. Open a fresh chat tomorrow and you’re back to em dashes and “seamless.”

So you pick between keeping a document open and pasting from it forever, or letting the drift happen and cleaning up after.

A skill takes the choice away. The file sits on your computer and Claude reads it on its own.

	Pasting a style guide	A Claude Code skill
Setup	Write it once	Write it once, save as a file
Every new chat	Paste it again	Nothing to do
When you forget	Output drifts back	Still applies
Updating a rule	Edit the doc, remember to re-paste	Edit the file, done
Works across projects	Only where you paste it	Everywhere on your machine
Coding required	None	None

What a Claude Code skill actually is

A skill is a folder with one file in it, called SKILL.md. That’s the entire thing. No code, no install step, no build.

The file has two parts. A short block at the top holding a name and a description, then ordinary markdown underneath with your instructions.

The description is doing more work than it looks like. Claude reads only the descriptions when it starts up, and pulls in the full file when what you asked for matches one. So a stack of these sits on your machine costing nothing until the moment one fits the job.

Yours goes here:

~/.claude/skills/my-voice/SKILL.md

Make the my-voice folder, put SKILL.md inside it, restart Claude Code. It’ll find it.

You don’t need to know how to code for any of this. You need to be able to make a folder and save a text file, which you already do.

Start with the words you hate

If I had to throw out every section of my voice skill but one, I’d keep the banned words list.

Mine runs around 60 words now. It started with five. Every time I caught myself deleting the same thing for the second time, the word went on the list, and it hasn’t stopped growing since. Four phrases went on in a single sitting back in August, including “quietly” and “here’s the kicker,” which I’d been cutting out of drafts for weeks before I bothered writing them down.

The reason it’s the best starting point is the bar to entry. You don’t need to describe your voice, which is genuinely hard. You need three words you’re tired of seeing. Everyone has three.

The template you can copy

Copy this into ~/.claude/skills/my-voice/SKILL.md and fill in the brackets. Every section is optional except the block at the top.

---
name: my-voice
description: My writing voice for blog posts, emails, and captions. Use whenever writing or editing anything a reader will see.
---

# My Writing Voice

## The short version
[One or two sentences. Who am I talking to, and how does it feel to read me?
Describe it the way you'd describe how a friend talks.]

## Words I never use
[Start with three you're sick of deleting. Add one every time you catch another.]

## Rules
- [A rule you can check with your eyes. "No em dashes." "Contractions always."]
- [Another one.]

## What good sounds like
> [Paste a real sentence you wrote and liked.]

## What bad sounds like
> [Paste a real sentence the AI wrote and you deleted.]

## Never do this
- [The thing it keeps getting wrong about you.]

Two things about the description line at the top. Keep it specific about when the skill applies, because that sentence is what Claude matches against. And say “use whenever,” not “use if,” so it leans toward loading it.

Start with the banned words section and leave the rest bracketed. You can fill them in over the next month as things annoy you. Mine is 476 lines now, and I promise it did not start that way.

What I got wrong

I banned a word I use in real life.

“actually” sat on my list for months. It’s a classic AI filler word, so onto the pile it went with “delve” and “unlock.” Then I kept reading drafts back and hearing something slightly off, like a version of me with the edges sanded down.

I took it off the list on May 25. It’s in the file with the date next to it, because I wanted the reminder. “actually” is how I talk. Banning it wasn’t cleaning up AI slop, it was scrubbing me out of my own writing.

The lesson is small and it saves you a lot of second-guessing later: the list edits in both directions. Adding a word is normal. Taking one back off is equally normal. A rule that makes your writing sound less like you is a bad rule, no matter how AI-ish the word looks on paper.

The other thing I’d tell past me is to keep it short at the start. A long file feels productive to write and does nothing extra. Five words beat five hundred, because five words get used.

Frequently asked questions

Try it yourself

Make the folder, save a file with three words you’re sick of deleting, and go write something. A Claude Code skill for writing is a text file you save once so your style rules apply on their own, which means the fix takes about five minutes and then keeps working without you.

If you want the voice part sorted before you make the file, start with my walkthrough on customizing LLM voice and then come back and save it here. Once this one is running, part 2 covers the skill that checks a finished post before you publish it, which is the same idea pointed at a different job.

This kicks off Claude Code for Bloggers, my series on building your own tools without being a developer, so subscribe if you want the rest. More templates, more skills, and the workflow blueprints I keep promising are coming.